Workshop at the Estonian Academy of Arts

In the context of the Erasmus teaching exchange program Varvara Guljajeva, was leading a workshop at the Estonian Academy of Arts in Tallinn from 17th to 21st of May. The 5-day class was a combination of theory and practice, and meant to achieve basic interactive results with little or no previous technical knowledge. During the first two days a group of seven students was introduced to interactive art and encouraged to discuss the role of interaction in general. Then the participants were given a classical interactive art work, which they had to break down according to the introduced interaction models. The following step was a hardware and software introduction, where various sensors, the Arduino micro controller and its development environment, as well as the Processing language were presented. Students had to complete several exercises in order to gather understanding about the logic of sensors, micro controllers, and their interface to a computer. After these initial exercises the participants proposed their own project ideas and developed the according interaction scenarios.